Overcoming Creative Block

San Francisco-based designer and musician Scott Hansen asked 25 other creative people how they get out of a creative rut for his ISO50 blog. The answers he got back are inspirational, like this one from Khoi Vinh of NYTimes.com.

Lots of reading and lots of sketching. The reading part is a long-term
strategy: constantly consuming ideas, influences, details, angles,
metaphors, symbols, etc. and storing them in the back of your brain so
that later on — sometimes much later on — you have a rich catalog of
starting points to draw upon. The sketching is a way to activate all of
that background information when faced with a problem in the present:
the act of drawing, of giving visual expression to many different ideas
in short order helps you sort through all of those random elements and
to make unexpected connections between them. The key is to sketch
quickly, without getting caught up in the execution or technique, that
way you stay in the realm of content, without getting bogged down in
form.